Online advertising is not banner advertising-Lets get Creative!

So you’ve designed a gazillion banners and it seems like that’s the only way to market, and it’s getting as boring as unbuttered brown bread. What now? Well, I suggest we look at a few of the exciting guerrilla campaigns we’ve done in the past as designers. Guerrilla marketing campaigns are different, interactive and often found in unexpected places. These campaigns were going viral long before YouTube.

How exciting would this be if we could do this on websites? What if you could load hits and tips on different websites that would leave the viewer wondering what you were marketing about? What if you had an oddly-shaped banner placed in a random place on your site? What If you designed funny adverts for your error pages (404 errors)? The possibilities are endless.

There’s no doubt that YouTube is a great place to advertise. People choose to see your work. They choose to make the artwork go viral. This is more precious than any traditional advertising method. YouTube forces the creative to be really creative, making for an excellent medium.

Another tip? Avoid pop-ups. Oh, how I hate pop ups, I hate them as much as I hate peanuts and green socks. Surprising the viewer is a good thing, annoying them is worse for your brand. Whatever method you choose to use, make sure it is easy to close, and remember that what is awesome to you may be boring or silly to the next person. Don’t use sound if it’s not a video. You don’t want to scare the pants off the sleepy guy in the cubicle next to you, he needs his sleep.

The future of online advertising will be like the existing coupon systems. Viewers will need to be enticed to keep the ads they see, bookmarking them if you like them. Obviously, an incentive will have to be set. Banners are not something you and I would like to keep, and it’s an extremely dry form of advertising from a design point of view. So, be the first to create something I’d like to keep, something that will be emailed virally. Who knows? Maybe one day soon, videos won’t be the only viral mediums.

FYI:

Above is the image is the first banner ever. HotWired was the first web site to sell banner ads to a wide range of major corporate advertisers.
The first web banner sold by HotWired was paid for by AT&T, and was put online on October 25, 1994.

Artwell Nwaila

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